Profile – Blinksale

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Overview:

Want an easier way to manage invoices? Blinksale is for you. And even if invoices aren’t a problem for you, take a minute and check out their site. It is visually and functionally stunning. It oozes AJAX and Rails, and thoughtful, creative design. That’s not surprising, since a design company specializing in AJAX, Firewheel Design, created the site. But it is also wonderfully easy to use – the features are not just there to visually impress. I love it, and I never send invoices.

Blinksale tackles a simple need in a straightforward way. Invoices are always a hassle for small businesses. You either need to hack up a Word or Excel document and forward it, or use expensive accounting software. Some people just send text invoices in email. It’s not very pretty, and unless you are using accounting software there are few or no tools to help you follow up and manage invoices after they are sent.

Blinksale solves all of this. First, it takes moments to create and send a very professional invoice. I literally registered a new account, created a faux invoice and sent it to my partner at Archimedes Ventures, Keith Teare, in about 5 minutes (I billed him $25,000 for “services” – let’s see if the deadbeat pays).

Blinksale currently supports 160 currencies. You can include your paypal information in the invoice and be paid by that method, if you can do business with paypal (in my opinion the world is divided firmly into two types of people: people who’ve used paypal for one year or less, and people who’ve been ripped off by paypal and subsequently have been ignored and/or berated by paypal “customer service”). By the way, after registration, blinksale creates a unique home page for you – ours is techcrunch.blinksale.com.

After creating an invoice, there are a number of management tools at your disposal.

First, Mac users can sync their invoices with iCal. For the rest of us, an xml feed is available and you can subscribe to invoices via RSS. Reminders and Thank You notes can be sent to clients. Paid invoices can be marked as paid and closed out.

Subscription Plans

Blinksale has a number of account options, ranging from free to $29/month. The paid plans all have a 30 day free trial, and there is no minimum period (and no refunds for termination before the end of a month). The paid plans allow for customized templates (using CSS), more users, more invoices, more clients, etc.

Blinksale Manifesto:

Put simply, receiving payment for services performed or goods sold is why most of us work. While many small business owners, contractors, and freelancers enjoy the work they perform, most of us would rather be skiing. Or on a lake. Or in front of a 60-inch plasma TV. We work so we can get paid. And if we get paid enough, perhaps we won’t have to work as much. Getting paid for your services should be easy, painless, and quick. This is why we created Blinksale. Link

For futher reading, the Blinksale blog is here, and the Firewheel Design blog is here. See also SideJobTrack, which is a competitor.

I started doing a pricing comparison table for another post – but some of these services use very unique pricing points like ‘cpu units’ and things like that which makes it hard. I think RAM/hour is better than some arbitary ‘CPU’ unit.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/ Don MacAskill

@Nik: I don’t – I could care, within reason, about RAM. I want raw CPU horsepower. That’s why I was so thrilled when EC2 came out with the high-CPU variants. All that RAM is wasted for me – I just want 8 or more physical cores. I think EC2 is heading down the right path – you can choose CPU-heavy or RAM-heavy and various sizes of each of those.

@Paul: I must be missing something. The article says EC2 charges $0.10/GB RAM/hour and you charge $0.08/GB RAM/hour. But your pricing page says you charge $0.19/GB RAM/hour. Which is it? (And I have no idea what EC2 charges, since I’ve never priced anything on RAM/hour before. Dunno if the article is right or wrong on that point).

Also, Paul, your “Learn More” popup has you dividing 263GB by 512KB rather than 512MB. :)

Andy

I’d love to recommend GoGrid to some clients, but I think some wouldn’t like the Beta label. It’s not an issue to me. And I realise the reasons, with a new hi-tech system. But hope they feel happy to remove the Beta tag in the coming months.

http://www.gogrid.com Paul Lappas

Don: CPU horsepower increases with RAM and you can choose to launch Linux or WIndows servers with 0.5, 1, or 2 GB of RAM today and we’re adding 4 and 8 GB options this month. More info at:http://blog.gogrid.com/tag/cpu

http://joblogs.cc Steve Ireland

I’ve been following this area with great interest and (besides S3) GoGrid is the only cloud play I came back to for a second glance. I’d love to get 100% of our stack out there and their service appears to be simple and compatible with our various technical requirements and operational expectations. I plan to set some time aside to evaluate their service further and see how everything hangs together in a loaded scenario.

jon

Calley – how was the performance of the blog you setup? Obviously there was no traffic going to it but was it responsive?

[…] CloudComputing SaaS: GoGrid Hits 1000 Customer Mark GoGrid is a cheaper and easier alternative to EC2. It also has a GUI-based control panel, simplifying the process of setting up your network of machines with load balancers, web servers and database servers in either Linux flavors or Windows. (tags: cloudcomputing ec2 gogrif) […]

http://www.livecrunch.com/2008/07/07/gogrid-with-over-1000-customers/ GoGrid With Over 1000 Customers

The article gave a list of competitors, but all have servers physically located in the US. EU customers will want to consider local cloud infrastructure vendors to improve network bandwidth/latency and ensure EU jurisdiction of their data (c.f. US Patriot Act, EU Directive on the Protection of Personal Data). The two UK players are ElasticHosts (ourselves, http://www.elastichosts.com/ ) and FlexiScale.

http://www.3tera.com PeterNic

3Tera’s datacenter operators provide cloud computing services all over the world — US and Europe currently, with Canada, Asia and Australia coming up. Customers can freely migrate any applications they operate between continents and between providers — be it for high availability, local access or better service.

Rick

We are launching a new app, and love the idea of scaling our network using the cloud, and still have full root access. Unfortunately, when I try to ask a simple question about SSL support to their sales rep (Marc), they don’t give you direct answer, only shoot you to a wiki site and try to qualify you for sales purposes. My recommendation to gogrid – if your trying to convert new users to your service (moving from physical machines to a virtualized cloud), focus on supporting and answering questions that are relative to prospective customers and their needs. I would hate to see your support!

1,000 paying customers doesn’t sound like that much, but i guess it’s only 16 months. How big is GoGrid’s operation, and how big are their customers?

http://www.xgenapplications.com pcgreene

Took all of 20 minutes today to realize that GoGrid was not going to be a company/service I wanted to invest much of my time in.

The task was simply to set up a temporary MySQL 5.0 instance to execute some tests related to a project I was working on. I created an account (2 minutes), logged in to the GoGrid interface and created a MySQL server (5 minutes).

I waited for he server indicator in the GoGrid interface to turn green (meaning it is active) – approx 10 minutes.

I then tried to remote into the server as instructed using the provided IP and account info. – Fail. The server did not appear to be at that address provided, or anywhere else for that matter.

No problem, this stuff happens. Lets open a support ticket. – Fail. The GoGrid interface required me to log in first but then told me “This account has been deactivated”. Really? Ok, let’s logout and back in to GoGrid and see… well that worked and I could even update my billing information and create new servers if I wanted to… doesn’t seem deactivated to me. Maybe just my ability to get support has been “deactivated” :)

Finally, I gave up and clicked the link to “Close My Account”. I was presented with a fully populated email that I could edit and send off (no online cancellation?). Funny thing is that the email allowed me to identify from a list the most common reasons for canceling an account. One of the reasons at the top of the list was “Too Many Technical Challenges” and further down the list was “Support Response Times/Availability”. Very telling.

I really love the product idea (ready availability of cloud services and VM’s), I just don’t think GoGrid is anywhere near ready for prime-time in the cloud services industry.